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You can now share your Facebook friend’s posts in a similar manner to the way you retweet a post in Twitter.

According to Mashable, Facebook rolled out the new feature called “Via” yesterday. It lets you repost a friend’s shared items with attribution. The Mashable post explains how it works:

“To try it, just go to a friend’s posted item in your news feed, click “share” and you’ll see a “via [your friend’s name]” (with an option to remove it). Once shared, the item will appear on your profile, with a via link that points to your friend’s profile. Your friends will also see the item in their News Feeds, creating the viral loop that is the Twitter (Twitter) retweet.”

The feature is only active for posted links and not other items such as status updates or photos. Also, you’ll only see the *share* link on newsfeed items that are posted for public view (i.e. based on the privacy settings set by the Facebook friend who you are quoting).

If you’re a Twitter fan, you probably already know that the second annual Shorty Awards are underway. If not, then let me explain.

The Shorty Awards are a celebration of excellent Twitter content, as voted by the community. Voting is now open in 27 official categories such as tech, humor, weird, government, news and art, but votes are also being accepted in unofficial, crowd-sourced categories.

You can do this on Twitter.com, with any Twitter client, or using the voting box on the Shorty Award site.

In February, the nominees will be narrowed down to five finalists in each category, with winners determined by a combination of popular vote and by the members of the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences. In March, an awards ceremony, complete with 140-character acceptance speeches, will be held in New York City and live streamed on the web.

If you missed out on a Shorty last year, never fear. You’ve got the whole of January to garner votes and topple the early leaders.

That’s right – you can now view web data, as it is published globally on blogs and social media sites IN REAL TIME.

From the official Google blog post:

“…we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.”

To enable Real Time Search to become a reality, Google has been working hard for months on partnerships with major social sites such as Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca, as well as Twitter, with whom they partnered back in October. Although they haven’t confirmed it, word on the street is that they are paying Twitter for access to tweet feeds.

So what SERPs include Real Time Search? Google says searches for things like your favorite TV show, sporting events, breaking news stories or the latest developments in politics will trigger RTS.

I ran a couple of test searches and timely topics such as climate change and entertainment-related search queries such as movie titles and celebrities also triggered Real Time Search.

You can see my test tweet including *Michael Jackson* in the Real Time Search results under the heading “Latest Results for Michael Jackson” below:

That’s right, I was able to get featured on the first page of Google results for the search query *Michael Jackson*, simply by including that query in a tweet.

To get an idea of the searches likely to be impacted by RTS, visit Google Trends and view Hot Topics, which is a new feature added today to coincide with Real Time Search going live.

As exciting as Real Time Search is in terms of technological advancement, the real story is how easily RTS can be exploited. You can see how easily I featured on the first page of Google for the year’s most popular search query!

I discovered the new directory when I visited the Press Center today and was greeted with the message:

“New! Browse our official list of Google’s Twitter accounts”.

Clicking on the related link brings up a comprehensive list of 87 official Twitter accounts representing almost all of Google’s products and tools, as well as many of the Google regions worldwide. When I viewed it, the Twitter directory page hadn’t even been cached yet, indicating that it’s pretty new.

Prior to this new directory, Google’s Twitter accounts were being added to the related post on the official Google blog, but the new directory lists 16 more Twitter accounts, making it the authority now.

Google’s decision to create such a large number of Twitter accounts and link to them in such a prominent location highlights their continued infatuation with Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were dating with a view to forming a long term partnership.

Although I have a TweetDeck group dedicated to New Zealand based Twitter users, it’s still difficult to keep tabs on who is who and where they’re located.

My frustration hit an all-time high while trying to organize a Christchurch-based tweetup the other day so I decided to create a directory listing all the New Zealand tweeps that I follow based on location, linking to their Twitter profiles.

It struck me that others might find this helpful so I’ve opened up the post to all NZ based Twitter junkies. Feel free to add other NZ tweeple and their locations (nearest major city only please) in the comments and I’ll add them to the relevant sections.